Rebecca M. Blank (1955–2023)

[News]

February 21, 2023

The economics profession is saddened by the loss of the former AEA vice-president and 2021 Distinguished Fellow.

Abortion denials and financial distress

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What are the economic consequences of being denied an abortion?

Environmental Preferences and Technological Choices: Is Market Competition Clean or Dirty?

By Philippe Aghion, Roland Bénabou, Ralf Martin, and Alexandra Roulet

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

We investigate the effects of consumers' environmental concerns and market competition on firms' decisions to innovate in "clean" technologies. Agents care about their consumption and environmental footprint; firms pursue greener products to soften price ...

Isolating Personal Knowledge Spillovers: Coinventor Deaths and Spatial Citation Differentials

By Benjamin Balsmeier, Lee Fleming, and Sonja Lück

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

We propose a new method to estimate and isolate the localization of knowledge spillovers due to the physical presence of a person, using after-application but pre-grant deaths of differently located coinventors of the same patent. The approach estimates t...

Proximity to the Frontier, Markups, and the Response of Innovation to Foreign Competition: Evidence from Matched Production-Innovation Surveys in Chile

By Ana Paula Cusolito, Alvaro Garcia-Marin, and William F. Maloney

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

This paper employs a matched firm production-innovation panel dataset from Chile to explore the response of firm innovation to the increased competition arising from the China shock. The data cover a wider range of innovation inputs and outputs than previ...

Understanding the Ownership Structure of Corporate Bonds

By Ralph S. J. Koijen and Motohiro Yogo

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

Insurers are the largest institutional investors of corporate bonds. However, a standard theory of insurance markets, in which insurers maximize firm value subject to regulatory or risk constraints, predicts no allocation to corporate bonds. We resolve th...

Intergenerational Persistence in Child Mortality

By Frances Lu and Tom Vogl

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

We study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age,...

Robust Information Transmission

By Francesc Dilmé

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

This paper investigates robust information transmission between a sender and a receiver in the Crawford and Sobel (1982) model. We characterize behavior that remains equilibrium behavior independently of the form of a small communication cost. Under stand...

Macroeconomic Dynamics with Rigid Wage Contracts

By Tobias Broer, Karl Harmenberg, Per Krusell, and Erik Öberg

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

We adapt the wage contracting structure in Chari (1983) to a dynamic, balanced-growth setting with recontracting as in Calvo (1983). The resulting wage-rigidity framework dampens income effects in the short run, thus allowing significant responses of hour...

Cognitive Decline, Limited Awareness, Imperfect Agency, and Financial Well-Being

By John Ameriks, Andrew Caplin, Minjoon Lee, Matthew D. Shapiro, and Christopher Tonetti

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

Cognitive decline may lead older Americans to make poor financial decisions. Preventing poor decisions may require timely transfer of financial control to a reliable agent. Cognitive decline, however, can develop unnoticed, creating the possibility of sub...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2023

Front Matter

American Economic Review, March 2023

Relinquishing Riches: Auctions versus Informal Negotiations in Texas Oil and Gas Leasing

By Thomas R. Covert and Richard L. Sweeney

American Economic Review, March 2023

This paper compares outcomes from informally negotiated oil and gas leases to those awarded via centralized auction. We focus on Texas, where legislative decisions in the early twentieth century assigned thousands of proximate parcels to different mineral...

An Alternative Explanation for the "Fed Information Effect"

By Michael D. Bauer and Eric T. Swanson

American Economic Review, March 2023

Regressions of private-sector macroeconomic forecast revisions on monetary policy surprises often produce coefficients with signs opposite to standard macroeconomic models. The "Fed information effect" argues these puzzling results are due to monetary pol...

Partisanship and Fiscal Policy in Economic Unions: Evidence from US States

By Gerald Carlino, Thorsten Drautzburg, Robert Inman, and Nicholas Zarra

American Economic Review, March 2023

Partisanship of state governors affects the efficacy of US federal fiscal policy. Using close election data, we find partisan differences in the marginal propensity to spend federal intergovernmental transfers: Republican governors spend less than Democra...

When a Doctor Falls from the Sky: The Impact of Easing Doctor Supply Constraints on Mortality

By Edward N. Okeke

American Economic Review, March 2023

This paper describes the results of a policy experiment conducted in coordination with the Nigerian government. In this experiment, some communities were randomly selected to receive a new doctor. These doctors were posted to the local public health cente...

Subjective Performance Evaluation, Influence Activities, and Bureaucratic Work Behavior: Evidence from China

By Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, and Qiong Zhang

American Economic Review, March 2023

Subjective performance evaluation could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to pleasing their evaluator, relative to working toward the goals of the organization itself. We conduct a randomized field experiment among Chines...

Nonlinear Pricing with Underutilization: A Theory of Multi-part Tariffs

By Roberto Corrao, Joel P. Flynn, and Karthik A. Sastry

American Economic Review, March 2023

We study the nonlinear pricing of goods whose usage generates revenue for the seller and of which buyers can freely dispose. The optimal price schedule is a multi-part tariff, featuring tiers within which buyers pay a marginal price of zero. We apply our ...

Not Too Late: Improving Academic Outcomes among Adolescents

By Jonathan Guryan, Jens Ludwig, Monica P. Bhatt, Philip J. Cook, Jonathan M. V. Davis, Kenneth Dodge, George Farkas, Roland G. Fryer Jr., Susan Mayer, Harold Pollack, Laurence Steinberg, and Greg Stoddard

American Economic Review, March 2023

Improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students has proven challenging, particularly for children at older ages. We present two large-scale randomized controlled trials of a high-dosage tutoring program delivered to secondary school st...

CSWEP: Panel Data Project

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